Hannah Arendt

There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.

No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.

Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.

Nihilism is but the other side of conventionalism; its creed consists of negations of the current so-called positive values, to which it remains bound.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil.

Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

It is my contention that civil disobediences are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the country.

The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.

The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of pseudo-scholars.

This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes.

These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.

Immortality is what nature possesses without effort and without anybody's assistance, and immortality is what the mortals must therefore try to achieve if they want to live up to the world into which they were born, to live up to the things which surround them and to whose company they are admitted for a short while.

We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.

No civilization would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.

To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.

Dedicate yourself to the good you deserve and desire for yourself. Give yourself peace of mind. You deserve to be happy. You deserve delight.

The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.

It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.

Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses.

Manipulations of opinion insofar as they are inspired by well defined interests have limited goals their effect however if they happen to touch upon an issue of authentic concern is no longer subject to their control and may easily produce consequences they never foresaw or intended.

The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.

The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.

The more dubious and uncertain an instrument violence has become in international relations, the more it has gained in reputation and appeal in domestic affairs, specifically in the matter of revolution.

Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.

Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire; all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it.

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.

In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.

Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life.

Every thought is an afterthought.

Every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning.

War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.

Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.

Power is actualized only when word and deed have not parted company.

Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.

Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

Only crime and the criminal it is true confront us with the perplexity of radical evil but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.

Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.

Death not merely ends life it also bestows upon it a silent completeness snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.

Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content from which changes of mind might naturally arise.

Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.

Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.